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- [00:01]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to take a brief moment to tell you about a show from Crime House's sister studio, Rewind, that I know you'll love. It's called Government that Doesn't Suck, hosted by professors Lindsay Cormack and Greg Jackson from History that Doesn't Suck. Ever wonder how the weather forecast on your phone is so accurate? Or how your mail still gets across the country for less than a dollar? Or who actually built the highway you drove on this morning? Each episode tells the surpr of an American institution that you'll never look at the same way again. Listen to and follow Government that Doesn't Suck every other Monday on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Or watch video episodes on YouTube.
- [00:55]
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- [01:01]
Vanessa Richardson
By the summer of 1965, something strange was happening out in the cattle country southwest of Orlando, Florida. For more than a year, somebody had been quietly buying up the land and paying cash for every parcel. Nobody could figure out who it was. The buyers hid behind companies with names that gave nothing away. They hired lawyers clear across the state in Miami to throw reporters off the trail they traveled under fake names and wrote their plans in cod. Whoever this was had spent millions of dollars to stitch together a single tract of land nearly twice the size of Manhattan and gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure no one found out why. When the secret finally broke, the answer almost sounded like a letdown. The mystery buyer was Walt Disney, and he was building another Disneyland. Except he wasn't. Walt Disney wasn't planning a theme park at all. He was planning a city, one he would own, run like a private government and design so that the people who lived in it could never vote. The most controlled place in America was about to open and call itself the Happiest Place on Earth. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes. A Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think at the end of each episode. Please leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review, and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Almost everyone on Earth knows the name Disney. It means childhood and magic and the vacation you save up for years to give your kids. But there's another version of the story, one where a man who couldn't stand losing control built the most tightly managed environment in America and convinced all of us to call it magic. A place with its own private language, its own command center buried underground, and for more than half a century, its own working government. Today, I'm going to separate the myths from the facts. There's the rumor about a frozen body and whispers about a secret society. And then there's the city Walt designed where no one could vote. It sounds fake, but it's actually very real, backed up by his own words, by court records, and by the state of Florida itself. So how much of the so called magic was was really about something else entirely? All that and more coming up.
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Vanessa Richardson
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Vanessa Richardson
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- [06:16]
Vanessa Richardson
Here's something most people never notice on a trip to Walt Disney World. The person who hands you your popcorn isn't an employee. At least not in Disney's language. Officially, the parks don't have employees at all. They have cast members. Because as far as Disney's concerned, everyone there is part of one continuous performance. That's also why their uniforms are called costumes, and why the moment you see them, they're considered to be on stage. Step behind a door marked for staff, and they're backstage. And even you have a part to play. You're not a customer, you're a guest. And the production never stops. Not the rides, not the parades, not the street sweeper who twirls his broom like it's part of the choreography. The whole place runs on one idea. It isn't a business, it's a show. This isn't a cute marketing quirk. It's doctrine. New hires learn it before they learn anything else in an orientation course Disney calls traditions. Run out of a place called Disney University. Before you're taught your actual job, you're taught the language and the one rule that matters more than any other. Never break the illusion. Now, wanting your theme park to feel magical isn't sinister. That's just good business. But all of it. The language, the illusion, the one rule that you never, ever break came from one man. His name was Walter Elias Disney, and he did not grow up with magic. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1901, the fourth of five kids in a family that was always short on money. His father, Elias, could never quite catch a break. He bounced from farming to carpentry to construction work, always chasing the next thing that might actually pay off. When Walt was 4, that Chase moved the whole family to a small farm outside Marceline, Missouri. It was on that farm that Walt fell in love with drawing. The town doctor paid him a little money to sketch his horse one day, and that was all it took. Pretty soon he was copying the cartoons out of the newspaper and drawing on anything he could get his hands on. The farm didn't last. After about four years, it failed. And the Disney's moved again, this time to Kansas City, where Elias bought a newspaper delivery route and put his sons to work on it. Walt was nine. Every single morning, seven days a week, he dragged himself out of bed at 3:30 to deliver papers in the cold and dark before school. He'd later say that a lot of the habits and complex compulsions that defined his adult life came straight from the grind of that paper route. Through all of it, the one constant was drawing. He took art classes when he could find the time and kept at it, even as the world around him fell into chaos. In 1918, with World War I still raging in Europe, 16 year old Walt lied about his age to join the Red Cross and shipped out to France as an ambulance driver, arriving just as the fighting ended. When he finally made it back home to Kansas City, he went chasing the one thing he'd always wanted to do. He landed a job at a company that cranked out crude little cartoon advertisements for local movie theaters. That job changed everything. It's where Walt Disney learned how to animate. And it's where he met a quiet, brilliant young artist named ub Iwerks. In 1922, Walt struck out on his own and opened his first real studio, Laugh O Gram Films. He had talent and a head full of ideas. What he didn't have was any feel for business. And within a year, Laugh O Gram was bankrupt. So he did what broke ambitious 20 somethings have always done. He went west. He landed in Hollywood, teamed up with his older brother Roy, who would handle the money for the rest of Walt's life, and he started over. Walt was rebuilding more than his career out West. In 1925, he married Lillian Bounds, a young woman who'd come to work for him at the studio as an inker, hand painting his cartoons one frame at a time. She would stay at his side for the rest of his life. They would go on to raise two daughters, Diane, born in 1933, and Sharon, who they adopted in 1936. His career was finding its feet too. The studio he'd built with Roy was turning out cartoons that resonated with audiences. And unlike the flame out back in Kansas City, this time it stuck. Still, the cartoon business of the 1920s looked nothing like the entertainment world today. There was no television yet, no screens glowing in anyone's living room. If you wanted to see a cartoon, you went to a movie theater where a short animated film would play before the main feature. And the people who drew those cartoons were rarely owned them. Here's how it worked. A small studio like Walt's would draw the cartoons and a separate company called a distributor would handle getting them into theaters across the country and pay the studio a flat fee for each one. The distributor put up the money and took the Risk. And in exchange, the distributor usually owned the rights to whatever got made. Walt's first real break came through a distributor named Margaret Winkler, who picked up a series he dreamed up called the Alice Comedies. It was a clever mix of a real little girl acting inside a hand drawn cartoon world. It did well. Well enough that when Winkler's husband, a man named Charles Mintz, took over her business, he brought Walt a bigger opportunity. Universal Pictures wanted to get into cartoons and they needed a character to build a series around. Specifically, they wanted a rabbit. So Walt and Ub Iwerks, who he'd partnered up with, gave them one. Oswald the lucky rabbit. And Oswald was a hit. A real one. There was Oswald merchandise in stores. A candy bar, a button, a stencil set. For the first time in his life, Walt Disney had a genuine star. And he thought he was finally standing on solid ground. He was wrong. In February of 1928, Walt took the train to New York to ask Mintz for a bigger budget. He figured he'd earned it. Instead, Mintz told him the budget was being cut by 20%. And then came the part that was even more important. While Walt wasn't looking, Mintz had quietly signed most of Walt's own animators to work for him directly. And Oswald himself. He belonged to Universal. Walt could walk away if he wanted to, but the character, the series and most of his staff would all stay behind without him. In a single meeting, Walt Disney lost his first real star and nearly his entire team. And there was nothing he could do about it, because on paper, almost none of it had ever been his. People often say Oswald was stolen from Walt. It's more accurate and a lot more revealing to say that Walt learned a brutal lesson about what happens when you build something valuable that you don't actually own. He decided right then that it would never happen again. Only one animator refused to go with Mintz. Ub Iwerks. He stayed. And the story goes that on the long train ride back to California, a heartbroken Walt started sketching a brand new character. One that would belong to him. Him completely a mouse. His name was Mickey. He made his debut later that year in a short called Steamboat Willie. One of the first cartoons ever made with fully synchronized sound. He was an overnight sensation. Mickey turned Walt Disney into a household name. And this time, Walt owned every inch of him. From there, the empire grew fast. Mickey led to a whole series of musical shorts. And those led to Walt's most reckless gamble yet. A feature length animated film. Something nobody in Hollywood believed audiences would sit still for the industry mocked it as Disney's folly. Then it came out. It was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It premiered in 1937, and it was huge. Huge. Snow White made Walt rich enough to build a dream factory. In 1940, his company moved into a brand new state of the art studio in Burbank, California. A sleek, modern campus designed down to the last detail. Meanwhile, the world outside that studio was changing fast. The country was crawling out of the Great Depression. Millions of people had lost their jobs. And the ones who still had work knew, knew they could be let go at any moment, for any reason. So workers started banding together. In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed a law called the National Labor Relations act, better known as the Wagner Act. It gave American workers for the first time the legal right to form a union and bargain as a group. It even created a federal agency to referee the fights between workers and their bosses. Hollywood took to it fast, and through the 1930s, the writers organized, then the actors, then the directors and the stagehands. And in 1938, the people who actually drew the cartoons formed a union of their own. The Screen Cartoonists Guild. By 1941, the guild's tough, charismatic president, Herbert Sorrell, had signed up nearly every big animation studio in town. Everyone except Disney. And inside that beautiful Burbank studio, resentment was quietly building. For one thing, the pay made no sense. One animator might earn hundreds of dollars a week, while the artist, sitting a few desks away from him, took home as little as 12 the best perks. The studio restaurant and the gym were reserved for the top tier of animators. Walt had also quietly cut a profit sharing bonus that a lot of his artists had been counting on. And then his next two big films, Pinocchio and Pantasia, both lost money in 1940, and the layoffs began. The people who drew Mickey Mouse had finally had enough. The breaking point was a man named Art Babbitt. Babbitt was one of Disney's most gifted and highest paid animators. The artist who'd brought Goofy to life. Walt had treated him almost like family. So when Babbitt didn't just join the union, but started signing up his co workers, Walt didn't see a business disagreement. He saw treason. And he fired him and 16 others. The next morning, on May 29, 1941, the strike began. Hundreds of Disney artists walked off the job and started waving signs and aimed right at the man whose name was on the building. They set up loudspeakers across the street and broadcast their chants straight into the studio. So Walt couldn't help but hear them. Walt didn't budge. But he didn't just fight the strike. He wanted to stop it from the top down and decided he already knew who was really behind it. Walt took out a notice in Variety and flatly declared that, quote, communist agitation, leadership and activities have brought about this strike. In his mind, his happy studio never could have turned on him on its own. Someone had to have poisoned it. It was a losing battle. Roosevelt's administration sent in a federal mediator who came down on the union side on essentially every issue. Walt had no choice but to sign a contract and his studio has been a union in shop ever since. On paper, his workers had won. But Walt never let it go. He rarely spoke about the strike again, and he never forgave it. As far as he was concerned, the people he'd trusted most had stabbed him in the back and gotten away with it. In the years that followed, that bitterness would pull Walt into the highest and most feared corners of the American government, a congressional hearing room, and an unlikely alliance with the FBI. The beloved uncle the whole country trusted was about to show a side of himself that almost no one knew existed.
- [18:55]
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- [19:23]
Vanessa Richardson
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- [20:12]
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- [20:44]
Vanessa Richardson
Walt got his revenge in 1947 in a hearing room in Washington D.C. a wave of anti communist fear was sweeping the country and he'd convinced himself the strike was never really about pay at all. It had been a communist plot. So Walt Disney sat down in front of the House UN American Activities Committee, the congressional panel that was hunting Communists, and testified as a friendly witness. He named union leader Herbert Sorrell, guild representative William Pomeranz, and former animator David Hilberman. He told the committee that the 1941 strike had been part of an organized communist effort to seize control of Hollywood. And this is where the story takes a turn that sounds made up, but isn't. Walt's fierce anti communism pulled him into the orbit of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Decades later, files released under the Freedom of Information act revealed a long friendly relationship between Walt Disney and the Bureau. In 1954, an FBI agent in Los Angeles recommended that Walt be made what the Bureau called an SAC contact. A trusted source agents could come to for information. Hoover personally signed off on it in early 1955. Now, I want to be careful here because this is exactly the kind of thing that gets blown out of proportion. According to the FBI's own Public affairs office, being an SAC contact did not mean Walt was some kind of a secret agent. It mostly meant the Bureau saw him as reliable and useful. What we do know is that Walt gave the FBI permission to film at their headquarters and reportedly offered up Disneyland for the Bureau's use. Whether you call that being an informant, the way one of his biographers later did, or just being a deeply anti communist businessman who liked having powerful friends is still up for debate. But the FBI file, the politics, the old grudges, in the end, all of it was just the backdrop. Because through these very same years, Walt's mind was somewhere else entirely. He was chasing a brand new idea. And it had started with his two daughters. On the weekends, Walt liked to take his girls to the amusement parks and carnivals around Los Angeles. And every single time, he came away disgusted. The places were dirty, rundown and cheap. So he'd sit on a bench while his daughters rode the carousel and he'd start to picture something completely different. A spotless, beautiful park where parents and kids could step right into the worlds of his movies. Over time, that daydream grew into something enormous and something deeply, almost obsessively personal. Not A park designed by a committee, but a single seamless world imagined, start to finish, by one man. Every ride, every pathway, every tree. It would be his and his alone. And he already knew what he would call it. Disneyland. But a dream like that costs money. The banks turned him down. The other studios passed too. So Walt placed a bet on a technology that was still brand new in American living rooms. Television. By the early 1950s, a struggling young network called ABC was hungry for hit shows. And Walt offered them a deal. He'd produce a weekly series for them, and in return, ABC would help finance the park. He named the show, fittingly, Disneyland. And it did double duty. Week after week. It paid for the park and advertised it to make millions of families. At the same time turning Walt himself into Uncle Walt, the most trusted face in America. On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California. And for the first time, Walt had it an entire world built exactly to his design. Inside that park, nothing existed by accident. Every view was framed on purpose. Every sound was chosen. Every worker was on stage. That whole philosophy you walk into today, the cast, the costumes, the show, all of it was born right there on 160 acres of former orange grove. There was just one problem. The park stopped at its own fence. The moment Disneyland became a hit, the land all around it exploded. Cheap motels, gift shops and greasy spoons crowded right up to the edge of his property. They soaked up the crowds and the money that his park had drawn in. Walt had built paradise, then had to stand there and watch strangers set up shop on its doorstep. Cashing in on something he had created and he couldn't do a thing about drove him crazy. And it crystallized the lesson that would define the rest of his life. A perfect park was worthless if he couldn't control the world around it, too. So next time, he wouldn't stop at the front gate. He'd take all of it. The roads leading in the land for miles in every direction. The rules, and even the government that enforced them. All he needed was a blank slate big enough to pull it off. He found one in the swamps of central Florida. Remember that mystery from the top of the episode? The buyer quietly snapping up Florida swampland through shell companies and fake names. By now, you know it was Walt Disney. Beginning in 1964, his agents assembled roughly 27,000 acres of cheap cattle country across two counties, Orange and Osceola. About 43 square miles for about $5 million without tipping off a soul. If word had ever gotten out that Disney was the buyer, the price would have Shot through the roof. So Walt even covered his own tracks. When a curious local asked what brought him to town, he smiled and said he was just being sentimental. He said his parents had been married nearby. The secret finally came apart because of one sharp reporter. Her name was Emily Bavar, and she edited the Sunday magazine at the Orlando Sentinel. In the fall of 1965, Disney flew her out to Anaheim along with a group of other journalists to celebrate Disneyland's 10th anniversary. While she was there, she asked Walt point blank whether he was the mystery buyer behind all that Florida land. Walt, the consummate showman, completely fumbled the question. Bayvar said he looked like she'd thrown a bucket of water in his face. That was all she needed. She flew home, dug through the county land records, and on October 24, 1965, the Sentinel ran a banner headline. We say Mystery Industry is Disney. Within days, the governor of Florida confirmed it. The secret was out. Walt Disney was coming to Florida. But even with his name in the headlines, no one understood just how far Walt's plans actually went. He was about to attempt something no company had ever tried. He called it epcot, short for the Experimental Prototype Community of tomorrow. In early 1966, Walt filmed a now famous pitch laying out exactly what he had in mind. It was a real working city of about 20,000 people with neighborhoods, school, schools, churches, parks, even a hospital. A complete community. There would be monorails and high speed trains, and every car and truck would travel through underground tunnels so the people up top could walk safely. Everyone living there would have a job. Some working for Disney directly, others for the big companies Walt planned to attract to the city's own industrial park. As a piece of urban planning, it was genuine, genuinely visionary. But listen to how Walt described the way his city would actually be run. He said, quote, it will be a planned, controlled community. There would be no slum areas because we wouldn't let them develop. And then the lines that give the whole thing away, there will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals, there will be no retirees. Everyone must be employed. End quote. Here's what that actually meant. In Walt City, you could live there, work there, and send your kids to those schools, but you could never own your home. Everyone would rent permanently. And since no one but Disney would own a single square foot of land, no one but Disney would ever get a vote. The whole city would be run from the top down by the company forever. And this was no slip of the tongue. Richard Fogelsong who wrote the definitive book on Disney and Florida, dug through the company's own archives and found the planning documents. Based on everything he read, Fogelsong concluded that, quote, they were afraid of democracy. To build a city like that, Walt needed something almost no private company had ever held. He needed ra real governmental power. And in 1967, the state of Florida simply handed it to him. They called it the Reedy Creek Improvement District. On paper, it sounded boring, just a special district to handle things like drainage and roads on Disney's land. But what the Florida legislature actually handed Disney was the power of a county government. Disney could write its own building codes, it could run its own zoning and pull planning with no say from the two counties it was in. It could start its own fire and police departments, build its own airport, and make and sell its own liquor. It could even build a nuclear power plant if it ever wanted one. Now, Disney never built that reactor or that airport, but the powers were real, and they were written right into Florida law. A private corporation had effectively been handed its own government. Fogelsong gave that arrangement the nickname that stuck. He called it a Vatican with mouse ears. Other people just called it Florida's 68th county. There was just one problem. Walt Disney never saw any of it. On December 15, 1966, before the reedy Creek deal was even final, before a single shovel hit the Florida dirt, Walt died of lung cancer. He was 65. The man who had spent his whole life trying to control everything around him was suddenly gone. And his Florida dream now rested with his older brother, Roy. Roy pushed it through. He even renamed the whole project Walt Disney World, so no one would ever forget whose dream it had been. The government was approved, the land was secured, but the city itself, the living, breathing city of 20,000 people, the entire deal had been built to justify. It was never built without Walt there to will it into existence. The company quietly decided that running a real city with real residents, real schools, real problems, was a headache it didn't want. So it built what it knew how to build Instead. Another theme park, the Magic Kingdom, opened in 1971. Epcot did open eventually, in 1982, but not as a city. It opened as a second theme park, a permanent World's Fair with no residents at all. But here's the part that's easy to miss. Disney never gave up the government. The dream city was dead. But Reedy Creek, that private, county sized government, stayed exactly where it was. And a government needs voters. So Disney solved that problem in the most Disney way imaginable. Instead of Walt's 20,000 renters who could never vote. The company carved out two tiny residential pockets inside the district. Two little towns called Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista. Then it moved in a few dozen handpicked loyal Disney employees. Those people, and almost no one else, became the only human being beings who could legally vote in Reedy Creek. Disney's own employees or cast members electing Disney's own government on Disney's own land. One scholar put it perfectly. The whole thing had been built on false pretenses. Disney was handed the powers of a government to build a city for thousands of people, never built the city and kept the powers anyway. And for half a century, that's exactly how it stayed, with almost no one outside Orlando paying attention. But plenty of people were sure Disney was hiding something. For decades, the rumors have run dark and strange. That Walt Disney's body lies frozen somewhere beneath the park, waiting to be brought back to life. That the whole company's a front for a secret society, its rides laced with coded symbols. That something, nothing, is buried under the Magic Kingdom. And here's the wild part. They're not entirely wrong. There really is something hidden beneath that park. But you might not know it's there.
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Vanessa Richardson
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- [36:02]
Vanessa Richardson
for decades, people have traded Disney conspiracy theories like baseball cards. And the most famous one of all is about a body. The story goes that when Walt Disney died, he wasn't buried and he wasn't cremated. He was frozen. His whole body or just his head. Sealed in a cryogenic chamber and hidden somewhere on Disney property, waiting for the day science could bring him back. Some versions even pick a spot right under the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. It's a great story. It's also completely false. Walt Disney was cremated two days after his death, and his ashes were placed in a marked public plot at Forest Lawn Memorial park in Glendale, California. It's all in the official records. His own daughter, Diane, spent years swatting the rumor down, calling it absolutely false and saying she doubted her father had even heard of cryonics. So where did it come from? The trail leads back to 1969, when the story first turned up in print in a French tabloid. In that article, a Disney executive blamed the rumor on the studio's own animators. A dark joke about the demanding boss they'd just lost. The secrecy of his private funeral didn't help. Neither did the fact that Walt had spent his final years designing a city of tomorrow. The myth kind of built itself. Then there's the other big one. That Disney is a front for a secret society. That Walt was a high ranking Freemason. That his parks are packed with hidden Masonic symbols. And that the proof is a mysterious, mysterious club tucked inside Disneyland called Club 33. Here's the truth. Walt Disney was never a Freemason. The closest he ever came was as a teenager in Kansas City when he joined the Order of Demolay. It was a youth group for teenage boys run under the Mason's wing that preached good character, civic duty and clean living. That's the whole connection. Club 33 is real. It's a private dining club. And for years, it was the only spot in the original Disneyland where you could order an alcoholic drink. But the name isn't a code. The club sits at number 33 Royal street in the park's New Orleans Square. And it's named for that address, plain and simple. It opened In June of 1967, six months after Walt died. And the Whole point was to give Disneyland's corporate sponsors a fancy place to be wined and dined. Even the Freemasons themselves have publicly waved off the idea that 33 is some Masonic signal. The hidden symbols people love to point at are theme park set dressing. So the frozen body or frozen head is a myth. The secret society is a myth. But Walt did hide something under the Magic Kingdom. And Disney will happily see sell you a ticket to go see it. Beneath the Magic Kingdom in Florida runs a network of tunnels called the utilidors. A roughly 9 acre underground world where the real work of the park gets done. Down there, an entire workforce moves invisibly. A cast member dressed for Frontierland never has to walk through Tomorrowland to get to work. They go underneath it, following color coded walls so the illusion overhead never breaks. There are cafeterias down there, locker rooms, even a barber shop. Delivery trucks, garbage, anything that might puncture the fantasy. It all stays out of sight. And here's the genius of it. Disney didn't dig down to build those tunnels. They couldn't. Central Florida is so swampy that if you dig more than a few feet, you hit water. So instead. Instead they built the tunnels at ground level and raised the entire Magic Kingdom on top of them, piling up millions of cubic yards of dirt hauled out of a man made lake. Which means the ground you walk in on isn't really the ground at all. It's the second story. By the time you reach Cinderella's castle, you've climbed to the third and you never noticed a single step. Running the whole operation is a system Disney called dax, the Digital Animation Control System. From control rooms down in the tunnels, it operates and monitors the park overhead. The animatronics, the lights, the stage doors, the precise timing of the magic. By Disney's own backstage tour count, it tracks tens of thousands of functions a second. The effortless magic you experience up top sits on one of the most tightly controlled cold environments on Earth. And it doesn't stop underground. Up in the park, you're constantly being watched. Cameras cover nearly every angle and plainclothes security officers move through the crowds in shorts and souvenir shirts, impossible to pick out from the guests around them. Cross a line and you might end up in what visitors have nicknamed Disney Jail. It's not a real jail. It's a plain back room where security can hold you. Because on private property, they're allowed to detain you until police arrive. Then they walk you out a door no other guest will ever see. It's the same instinct that built the tunnels. Anything that doesn't fit, the magic disappears. So yes, there is a hidden machine under the Magic Kingdom. But even that isn't the real secret. Because the most powerful thing Disney ever built was, wasn't a tunnel or a control room. It was that private government in Florida. The one hiding in plain sight in the statute books while everyone else hunted for frozen bodies and Masonic symbols. And in 2022, it finally cracked. Not because of a tabloid or a secret order, because of a fight over a law. That spring, Florida passed a new education law, the Parental Rights in Education act, which limited classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in the youngest grades. Disney publicly came out against it. In response, Governor Ron DeSantis and the state legislature moved against the one thing that set Disney apart from every other company in Florida. Its government. They voted to dissolve Reedy Creek the following year. They replaced it with a new district run by a state appointed board. And they stripped away Disney's most extreme powers. The airport, the nuclear plant, and renamed it the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. Disney refused to back down. It took the governor to federal court, arguing he had turned the machinery of the state against the company to punish it for speaking out. The lawsuit called it a targeted campaign of government retaliation. The governor had a blunt reply. They said no private company should ever have the right to run its own government in the first place. Disney's lawsuit never got its day in court. A judge dismissed it on a legal technicality and the fight ended in a 2024 settlement. Instead, Disney gave up the last minute deals its old board had rushed through, conceding they were void. And the two sides agreed to plan the resort's future side by side. But here's the twist that makes the Disney machine stranger than any frozen body. When the state of Florida opened a criminal investigation into all of it, the official conclusion was that Disney's old district had, in the investigator's words, quote, blurred lines, but broke no laws. None of it had ever been illegal. That's the part people miss when they go hunting for the dark secret of Disney. There was no secret. Disney never had to sneak its way into running a government. The state of Florida handed it the keys back in 1967 in a bill almost nobody bothered to read. The frozen body crowd and the freemason crowd spent 50 years chasing a hidden conspiracy. But the most audacious thing Walt Disney ever pulled off was done completely in the open, completely by way the the book and signed right into law. So here's what I keep coming back to and I want to know where you stand. That seamlessness you fall in love with at Disney. The spotless streets, the invisible workers, the sense that nothing is ever out of place isn't separate from the control. It is the control. The scripted words in a cast member's mouth, the tunnels under your feet. A county sized government with no real voters. It's all the same thing, just bigger each time. So knowing all of that, is the magic still worth it. Tell me in the comments, wherever you listen. I'd love to hear your thoughts. There's one last piece to this. Walt's dream of a city he could control forever. The city with no voters was never created. But decades later, his company found another use for that same stretch of Florida Swampland. In the 1990s, Disney's chief executive, Michael Eisner, moved the company into the real estate business. Disney still owned thousands of acres south of the parks, land it had bought for almost nothing back in the 1960s. And the plan was simple. They wanted to develop that cheap swamp into a real residential town and sell the homes. Disney pitched it as finally making good on Walt's old community dream. But the business logic was just as important. Turning near worthless land into a profitable subdivision. They called it Celebration. Celebration is a real place. Several thousand people live there today, in a town with a real downtown, real schools and homes that families actually, actually own. Demand was so high when the first lots went on sale that Disney ran a lottery and thousands of people paid just for a chance to buy in. But the town turned out to be the opposite of what Walt wanted in the one way that mattered most to him. It looks nothing like his futuristic city of tomorrow. There are no domes and no monorails. Just pure nostalgia. White picket fences, front porches, a main street that could have come straight out of one of his movies. And because those families own their homes, they can vote. Which, if you're Disney, is a problem. So before a single resident ever moved in, the company carved Celebration out of its own Reedy Creek government and handed it to ordinary Osceola County. Disney would build real people a real town. It just wouldn't let them inside the machine. A few years later, it sold off the town's commercial center and stepped back from running the place altogether. Because it turns out you can run a theme park like a flawless, controlled world. You can even run a government as long as the only voters work for you. But the moment you let real people move in and own their homes and live their messy, ordinary lives, it stops being a machine. It just becomes a town. That's the trade sitting at the center of the happiest place on earth. The magic is real, so is the control. And Walt Disney understood, maybe better than anyone who ever lived, that you can only have one of those things completely. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media crime house on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Perdovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
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